Adam Jastrzębski : Poison

Press Release

Adam Jastrzębski“Poison”

Natural and artificial, alive and dead, orderly and random – these are just a few of the opposite traits characterizing the works of Adam Jastrzębski that are part of his “Poison”. All of them represent key terms that distinguish between what is human and within our realm and what is inhuman and controlled by the elements as we understand them. The evolution of civilization, its scientific and artistic development, have come to a point where this distinction becomes more and more difficult to ascertain. We build machines, structures and systems that escape our control. We interfere in the natural environment, creating new ecosystems with the full awareness that we’re not fully capable of managing them, but we can’t stop ourselves from going forward.

Adam Jastrzębski’s “Poison” demonstrates how even the smallest particles in laboratory conditions are not entirely under our control, about how natural processes shape an entirely artificial reality, and how our understanding of the world is being tested today. Ultimately, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has put it, “nature does not exist”.